


No News is Good News: Dissecting the Timeline of the Second Colony

by The_Violet_Howler



Series: FreeVLDS8 Theories [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Essays, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2019-07-05
Packaged: 2020-06-09 16:40:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Violet_Howler/pseuds/The_Violet_Howler
Summary: Re-posted from Tumblr for archival purposes.One of TPL's major theories is that prior to the editing of Season 8, we would have learned what really happened at the second Colony where Alteans were allegedly being drained of their quintessence, and that Lotor would be redeemed for it. The leading theory based on evidence in the show is that the second colony was a military R&D facility where Alteans were being trained to design and fly ships that used their own quintessence as a power source.While this is never addressed in the season we got in December, there are enough clues in Seasons 3 - 6 that indicate that despite looking like it had been shut down years ago, the second colony was still operational until as late as the gap between Seasons 3 and 4.





	No News is Good News: Dissecting the Timeline of the Second Colony

With Lotor’s role in the second half of season 8 edited out, we are left with many unanswered questions about the Altean Colony and what Lotor was doing at the lunar outpost. Two rather significant ones are the questions of when and why the facility was shut down before Keith and Krolia’s arrival.

Romelle’s flashbacks are vague about the timing of when these events took place in relation to the series timeline, but what we were initially presented with on the surface in Season 6 seems to suggest that Lotor shut down the second colony several years before the return of Voltron. I’d argue that the shuttering of the Second Colony happened more recently than that. Much more recently.

Let’s rewind things to Season 3, Episode 6 “Tailing a Comet”.

In this episode, Team Voltron attempts to track the trans reality comet Lotor stole at the end of S3E4 Hole in the Sky. In the course of their search, they find Lotor’s generals attacking a Galra base under the command of Throk. The base contains a fragment of the large Teludav the heroes used as part of their plan to defeat Zarkon in S2E12 “Best Laid Plans”. Lotor’s generals attempt to steal the Teludav, but Team Voltron is able to trick Acxa into destroying it. Lotor is angred by the loss of the Teludav, but expresses satisfaction when Throk takes the fall from Haggar for failing to protect his base.

There are two details I want to point out:

First, while Allura’s mind immediately jumps to Haggar at the revelation that Lotor is after the Teludav, we know already from Season 3 that Lotor wants nothing to do with Haggar, even before Seasons 4-6 confirm he actively despises her. The only explanation, then, is that Lotor was stealing the Teludav fragment _from_ Haggar for his own purposes. But his surprise at having the Mark of the Chosen in S536 White Lion confirms that Lotor was unaware of his own potential for Altean Alchemy. This means that whatever Lotor was going to do with the Teludav, he wasn’t going to be using it himself.

Second, while Lotor is angry at Acxa for inadvertently destroying the Teludav, there is no evidence it was ever relevant to his plans to construct Sincline and access the Quintessence Field. There is nothing in his endeavors that even partially required the use of a Teludav, which means that he had a different purpose in mind for it.

But there is one facility that Lotor controlled that housed Alteans that – going by various comments in S6 and S7 – were there because of their high levels of Quintessence, and therefore, potential for Altean alchemy. Who – based on AJ Locascio’s post-S7 tweets, Sam Holt’s last line of S7E13, and Bandor’s ability to fly a shuttle pod back to the main colony even though none of the Alteans on the main colony knew how to fly one – fans have theorized were being taught to fly ships that used the pilot’s own Quintessence as a power source. 

All these details point to the Teludav fragment stolen in Tailing a Comet being intended for delivery to the second colony to be studied and reverse engineered.

But Lotor doesn’t seem like the type of person to leave something like a Teludav, or a piece of one, in storage, so if the Second Colony had already been shut down at this point, why was Lotor so furious with Acxa when the Teludav is destroyed?

Unless it wasn’t shut down.

Now, let’s look at the second thing that’s connected to the Colony: the Blue Quintessence introduced in Season 4.

Kolivan and Keith’s dialogue indicates that this type of Quintessence has never been seen in the empire before. While Season 6 would have us believe this was taken directly from the Alteans, the visuals of the series don’t agree on that:

Season 1 established in Collection and Excraction that raw Quintessence taken directly from a living being is colored Yellow.

Quintessence that has been processed into a concentrated form by Haggar and the Druids’ magic into imperial fuel is pinkish-purple.

And Quintessence that has been concentrated by Altean Alchemy is blue, as shown in The Legend Begins.

Lotor was not directly draining Alteans at the Second Colony because if he was, then the batches being exported would be the same yellow Quintessence seen in Collection and Extraction, and we’d be seeing Keith and Kolivan raid one of those bases to watch it all be processed.

But when discussing where the new Quintessence is coming from, Kolivan specifically mentions something that is capable of purifying raw quintessence directly into its pure blue-white form: The Komar, which Kolivan points out has already been destroyed. But the last thing Haggar used it to drain Quintessence from before Allura destroyed it…

Was Voltron. Which is so full of Quintessence that it overloaded the Komar and resulted in glowing blue-white orbs emanating from the device that look exactly like those seen when Allura and Lotor go into the Quintessence Field in S6E4.

As [@leakinghate](https://tmblr.co/m2dqoeMFn-m3jBepZ9tqRGg)[speculated](https://leakinghate.tumblr.com/post/180370418343/the-new-blue-quintessence), Lotor was trying to use Quintessence extracted directly from Voltron itself to power his plan to enter the Rift Gate in “Begin the Blitz”. The ship Ranveig and Krolia recovered carrying a vat of Quintessence through the Quantum Abyss was heading into it, to see if the new Quintessence could be used to heal the drained test pilots. When explaining how Ranveig got his hands on the vat of Quintessence, Krolia says only that the destroyed ship had passed through the Quantum Abyss, she did not specify which direction it had been traveling in. It’s all but stated that the same creatures that destroyed Keith and Krolia’s ship in “Razor’s Edge” are responsible for the cargo ship’s destruction.

Based on the time that appears to have elapsed between seasons, Ranveig would have captured the shipment travelling through the Quantum Abyss sometime between seasons 3 and 4, as the shipments are implied to have stopped after Lotor goes on the run in Black Site, leaving him with only the amounts stockpiled in the Sincline Ships when he and the generals escape.

But that raises the question: if the covert shipping network that Kolivan and Keith discovered was secretly funneling the blue Quintessence from Central Command to Lotor’s cruiser and the Second Colony, who was flying the ships?

While Hate suggested that none of the ships had crews past a certain point on the journey, someone had to pilot the ships through the Quantum Abyss or else the ships would have taken forever to get to the Colony. Like with his (false) claim of conspiring with Acxa, there are too many variables in the Quantum Abyss to believe that Lotor trusted autopilot to get the Quintessence to its destination.

So, who was flying the ships to and from the Second Colony?

In Romelle’s flashbacks where the Alteans are being tested for the second colony, Lotor is always accompanied by Galra medical/research officers. Previous seasons have established through shots of standard Galra troops working on constructing Sincline Ship #2 in S4E3 “Black Site” that there are Galra outside of his generals who Lotor trusts with his secret projects. This would make the medics who helped him oversee the Second Colony the ideal candidates to pilot the Quintessence shipments through the Quantum Abyss. And the medics are conspicuously absent when Keith and Krolia go to investigate the second colony.

Here’s what I think happened:

At some point between Seasons 3 and 4, the Altean pilots training at the Second Colony being testing the first Pilot-Quintessence-fueled ships. Due to faulty research, the energy demands of the ships are too much for their pilots, who are drained to the point of near death. The test pilots are quickly placed into stasis to keep them alive until Lotor has access to the resources for proper healing. One of the pilots, Bandor, panics. He steals a pod and manages to fly back to the main colony where he gives a cryptic statement about the second colony being a lie before dying in his sister’s arms. 

As has been theorized by others, Lotor gets ahold of the Quintessence Haggar extracted from Voltron. Thinking he can use it for his Sincline project, he ships it out a little bit at a time through a network of secret shipping routes, using decoy ships like the one Keith, Kolivan, and Regriss encounter in “Code of Honor” to throw Haggar off his trail and keep her from finding out what he’s up to.

The majority of the Quintessence is being delivered to his personal cruiser to be used by his Sincline ships, but he thinks he might be able to use it to heal the drained Alteans and has a shipment set aside to be taken to the Colony.

The medics take a cargo ship from the Second Colony through the Quantum Abyss to collect the shipment. Since all of them are going to ensure the security of the shipment (we don’t have a confirmed number, but the maximum seen on screen at once was 5), they leave the lunar outpost running on low power, shutting down everything but the stasis pods and whatever systems are necessary to keep those running.

They collect the shipment just fine, notify Lotor that the package has been received, and start their return journey back to the colony.

On their way back through the Quantum abyss, something goes wrong. The same creatures that attack Keith and Krolia arrive and attack the cargo ship. The medics are armed and start opening fire on the creatures, but their hits don’t land, and they end up damaging the ship themselves. Between the creatures and the misfires, the ship is torn to pieces and the medics are either killed, or they ejected, only to be sucked into a gravity well and lost forever.

Given the nature of the Quantum Abyss, communication between one party inside the abyss and one party outside would be spotty at best, impossible at worst. And given his paranoia over keeping his plans secret from Haggar, it would be plausible that Lotor would order the medics to only contact him in the event of an emergency. Even after becoming emperor, Lotor assumes that the colony is still secure since the medics haven’t called to tell him that the secrecy of the Alteans has been compromised. 

But then suddenly one of the Alteans from the Colony – worse, Bandor’s sister – arrives on the Castle of Lions, accusing him of murdering Alteans in cold blood, and he realizes that the medics are dead. That the shipment of Quintessence never made it to the Second Colony. That with the base running on minimal power there would have been no way for Keith and Krolia to access the computer files and verify what was really going on. That all they would have seen was an abandoned facility full of desiccated Alteans and assumed the worst.

TL;DR: The failure of the second colony happened sometime between Tailing a Comet and Code of Honor. The reason the facility was abandoned was because the medics had left to collect a shipment of the blue Quintessence only to be killed on their return journey by the same creatures which later attack Keith and Krolia.


End file.
